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The Promise

Columbia / Sony; 2010

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Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 1977 and 1978, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material.

That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.

Even more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. That's partly why he burned to cut another record-- to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing."

Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you.

The stark reality of the songs is reinforced by the album's production. Darkness is in its own way as sonically consistent and coherent as Born to Run; but where that album drew inspiration from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Darkness tries to do as much as possible with a minimum of embellishment. A few tracks break from this dry and barren template. "Candy's Room" and "Something in the Night" have the tinkling piano and glockenspiel that might have helped them to fit on Born to Run, while "Racing in the Street" has a very particular and hugely effective atmosphere, with just the right touches of reverb and backing vocals to make it sound like an elegy. As for the remastering, I'm not hearing a lot of difference here, but Darkness always sounded good. From the opening drum fill of "Badlands" to the grim fade of the title track, there's not a weak song on the album and it deservedly ranks with Springsteen's classics. Which means that it ranks with rock's classic albums, full stop.

And it took a long time to get it that way. The music on the 2xCD set The Promise, which was written during the Darkness sessions, shows what Springsteen had to leave behind to get the record that he wanted. That meant no big pop songs. There's "Because the Night", given to Patti Smith before being completed, which she then improved and turned into her biggest hit. And then "Fire", which Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters, and which went to No. 2 on Billboard. It also means no songs about easy times, hope, and escape. So "Gotta Get That Feeling", an appealing mid-tempo track with horns and sweet backing vocals and lines like "We ain't got no money but we don't care" was shelved. (In Darkness, people have no money but they do care, a lot.) And "Save My Love", a catchy piano-led tune, isn't going to make Darkness with lines like "If we open up our hearts/ Love won't forsake us." Tell that to the couple in "Racing in the Street".

The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs for material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best. The set kicks off with "Racing in the Street ('78)", a version that begins as an austere ballad but builds into a rock song. It's nowhere near as effective as what came to be on the record, but it is riveting, showing just how elastic Springsteen's melodic and thematic ideas could be. An early version of "Candy's Room" is here, too, and it's called "Candy's Boy"; instead of the original's dark and explosive sensuality, here it's a clean, shuffling guitar-pop tune, charming but without a lot at stake.

The tracks on The Promise CD aren't left out just because of subject matter or tone-- they also sound different. As with some songs on Tracks, some of these songs had parts added later. "Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition," Springsteen writes in the notes. "Many stand as they were recorded all those years ago." The re-touching is at its most extreme on "Save My Love", which was written in the 70s but cut in 2010. In other places, the vocals and music sound fundamentally different from the recordings of the era. Certainly, the arrangements are thicker than what wound up on Darkness, which makes sense since some of the songs left behind were R&B-based bar-band songs and swooning songs of love and lust. Still, despite the lack of consistency, the 22 new songs (there are 21 tracks, but "The Way" is a hidden bonus track at the end) are mostly very good and occasionally great. None feel like they should have been on Darkness, but almost all of them hold up to repeat plays and stand on their own as very good Springsteen-- easily on the level of mid-level stuff on The River, say.

On the visual side, one DVD has a bizarre recording of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through in an empty theater in Asbury Park in December 2009. I suspect that this decision was inspired in part by the notion that the album is about loneliness and open spaces, but there's something off about seeing this band, known so well for its deep connection to its audience, playing by themselves in a large room without people.

More interesting on the same disc are the live odds-and-ends from rehearsals at Springsteen's rented Jersey home in the 70s. The band is packed into what looks like a small bedroom, Springsteen is shirtless, with the familiar guitar around his neck, standing before a microphone taped to a stand. And the band is running through a couple new songs in an intimate space with no sense at all of posterity. (They are so casual, Steve Van Zant isn't even wearing a hat!) Also on this disc are songs from a 1978 show in Phoenix, including the famous clip for "Rosalita" that got some play in the early days of MTV. These Phoenix performances are generally superior to the three-hour set from a 1978 show in Houston included on a separate DVD. The video comes from the arena's video feed and, given the quality of video in 1978, quality could be better. But it is a multi-camera shoot with good coverage and Springsteen and the E Street band were in amazing form throughout that year. So no complaints about more live Springsteen.

Which leaves the documentary, which in one sense serves as the centerpiece of the project. As with the film included with the Born to Run box, there are interesting details about the technical aspects of the album. Chuck Plotkin's theory behind his approach to mixing vocals is fascinating, and explains why this album feels so balanced. We see fragments of songs, lots of exhaustion and sitting around, and get a look at how Springsteen works as a bandleader. There's a moment in the first scene where he looks tired and frustrated and a little pissed off and you realize that it would be scary to have him mad at you. He's not always an easy guy to work for. It's refreshing to see such a simple display of humanity when the documentary obviously has very specific points that it wants to hit.

Still, there's something odd about these "making of" documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young's Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It's easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it's also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen's fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made. We'll take it all and have loads of fun exploring all the ephemera, but Springsteen carved through all this-- the pile of songs, the legal bullshit, the media image he wasn't comfortable with-- to make that one magical record, which is the most impressive part of it all.